Nissan, NASA extend research into autonomous mobility services

At CES 2018, Nissan North America, Inc., the U.S.- based subsidiary of Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., announced an agreement with NASA Ames Research Centre in California’s Silicon Valley to collaborate on research and technology development for future autonomous mobility services, including a working demonstration in Silicon Valley.

The existing research collaboration between Nissan and NASA builds on previous success to define a new scope of activities into 2019 and is the latest step in Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility (IM) vision.

Under the terms of the five-year research and development partnership, researchers from the Nissan Research Centre in Silicon Valley and NASA Ames have been working together to advance autonomous vehicle systems.

In January 2017, at CES in Las Vegas, Nissan introduced Nissan Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM), a new platform for managing fleets of autonomous vehicles, developed from NASA technology.

This new phase in the collaboration will build on that success to further develop the technology and test the use of SAM for managing autonomous transportation services, ahead of public implementations.

“We built SAM from technology NASA developed for managing interplanetary rovers as they move around unpredictable landscapes,” said Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Centre in Silicon Valley. “Our goal is to deploy SAM to help third-party organizations safely integrate a fleet of autonomous vehicles in unpredictable urban environments, for example ride-hailing services, public transportation or logistics and delivery services. The final stage of our existing research agreement with NASA will bring us closer to that goal and test SAM in a working demonstration on public streets.”

Nissan South Africa is showcasing intelligent mobility in many ways as it has intelligent mobility available in several models of their vehicles, Nissan Patrol, Nissan X-Trail and the Nissan LEAF.